Loverboy is a Kevin Bacon film starring his wife Kyra Sedgwick. The cast also includes
Marisa Tomei, Sandra Bullock, Blair Brown, Oliver Platt, Matt Dillon, Bacon, and Bacon's children. Although IMDb lists this as a Drama/Romance,
it was one of the more chilling films I have seen. The story is told in a
series of flashbacks, where the present day is in the front seat of a car
where
Sedgwick is teaching her six-year-old son to drive. In the series of
flashbacks, we see how she had a troubled upbringing, and decided she had no
interest in men or marriage, but desperately wanted a child. Her first plan
was to screw a succession of men and give birth to a perfect kid. That
ended in a miscarriage. She was about to give up when she was seduced and
impregnated by a
conventioneer. She decided that the resulting child was
her own personal property, and would be raised by her to be an exceptional
child. Since her parents had left her some money, she could afford to do what she
wanted. Rather than enter her son in kindergarten, she does her own version of
home schooling, but the boy soon longs for friends his own age and wants to start
school. As the film goes on, we see how disturbed the mom is.

In the feature length commentary Kevin Bacon praised Dominic Scott Kay,
who played the son, but the boy did not impress me with his
ability. He had
the proper precociousness, but I didn't buy all of his line readings. On the
other hand, Bacon did a great job of choosing locations and putting together a
highly professional film without much money. Loverboy was a very low budget
effort, but that didn't show, and in the last analysis the story affected me
deeply, which speaks to how well it was made. I have known obsessive mothers
like this, and that made the film a very painful experience.

DVD INFO

No features

the transfer is anamorphically
enhanced, and is not especially vivid

NUDITY REPORT

Kyra Sedgwick shows breasts, buns, and a hint of bush during the early
stages of the film.

Scoop's notes

MAJOR SPOILERS:

The good news: the Loverboy
script is one of Shakespeare's greatest works.

The bad news: it's HANNAH Shakespeare.

Loverboy is, at least in theory, a melodrama about
a psychotically possessive mother. I added the stipulation because the
story also includes some moments of bizarre and perhaps inappropriate
comedy.

The mother in question was raised by parents who
were so wound up in one another that they barely noticed her. She
resolves to be the opposite kind of parent, and succeeds perfectly.
After a circuitous process, she manages to conceive a child and
instantly makes her offspring into her full-time job. (Her parents
left her financially independent.) All of this seems beautiful while
the child is an infant because the mother is loving, doting and
totally attentive. But ominous signs appear whenever the boy starts to
develop curiosity about the outside world. His mother insists that he
keep his focus entirely on her. She reacts in increasingly extreme
ways whenever she has any type of competition for her son's attention,
so that her mental state is gradually revealed to be not attentive,
but smothering.

This film really struggles to find an appropriate
tone. The mother's own childhood is recalled in flashbacks, and since
the past is seen not as objective history but through her own
disturbed memories, her parents (played by Bacon and Marisa Tomei)
are seen as grotesque caricatures of thoughtless, self-absorbed
70s-era hipsters. Bacon does his best impersonation of Dr. Hunter
Thompson, as filtered through Eugene Levy's own 1970s character,
comedian Bobby Bittman, clad in tacky leisure suits and constantly
misfiring rapid-fire remarks which are designed to be funny. There's
nothing wrong with the Tomei-Bacon scenes. They are pretty funny when
considered on their own. And there's nothing wrong with the fact that
the characters are so one-dimensional, because they exist only in the
mother's tormented memories. It's just that, well, the zany comedy
seems to be in a different movie from the tragic story which unfolds
in the present. The inconsistency of the tone runs through the film's
other flashbacks as well. Momma's attempts at conception, for example,
play out as a sex farce.

I think the ending of the film is supposed to be a
surprise, but I only know that because some other people have
mentioned it. I saw the very first scene and immediately concluded
that the mother was committing suicide and taking her son with her. I
mean, they are in the car, the kid is behind the wheel, the ignition
is clearly on, they've packed enough for a day trip, and the car is in
park. What else could it be? Maybe I would have enjoyed the film more
if I had been aware that there was supposed to be a secret. I can't
say.

While we're on the subject of that ending, the film
didn't even have the courage of its convictions. The boy survives the
carbon monoxide poisoning. After the suicide has been revealed (along
with the similarly grotesque fate of Bacon and Tomei in the
flashbacks), it tacks on a strangely sentimental epilogue in which the
boy is revealed to have grown to young adulthood, and is remembering
his mother's tenderness with sad fondness. The film got a bit muddled
there, perhaps because Bacon made some changes to the original story
and those changes required other elements to be reinterpreted. In the
book, both the mother and the son survived the suicide. Bacon decided
that he wanted the mother to die, but that change required other
changes, especially the disastrous epilogue. Is this a film about an
eccentric, loving woman who was a bit misguided? It seems to be that
at first. Then it seems to be a satire with a pitch-black sense of
humor. Then it seems to be a melodrama about a deranged psychopath.
Then the epilogue returns it to "lovable but troubled eccentric" mode.

My final problem with the film is its
repetitiousness. It makes the point that the mother overreacts to
competition for her son's attention. Then it makes the point again,
and again, and ...

It played at Sundance in 2005, but distributors
knew that the film was totally unmarketable, so it was never in more
than ten theaters, and even that perfunctory release occurred more
than a year after its festival premiere. Because of the Sundance
exposure, it did pick up some reviews, almost universally negative.
(18% positive, per RT.)

Loverboy was Kevin Bacon's second full-length
directorial effort, following many years after the other, a 1996
Showtime film called Losing Chase. I can see that Bacon has some
talent as a director, and he certainly has the ability to attract
talented people to his projects. This micro-budget film is full of
name actors in tiny roles. Bacon also has the ability to draw on the
considerable acting talents of his wife (who played the lead here) and
himself. Given all those elements, I'll bet he has a good movie or two
in him somewhere.

The meaning of the IMDb
score: 7.5 usually indicates a level of
excellence equivalent to about three and a half stars
from the critics. 6.0 usually indicates lukewarm
watchability, comparable to approximately two and a half stars
from the critics. The fives are generally not
worthwhile unless they are really your kind of
material, equivalent to about a two star rating from the critics,
or a C- from our system.
Films rated below five are generally awful even if you
like that kind of film - this score is roughly equivalent to one
and a half stars from the critics or a D on our scale. (Possibly even less,
depending on just how far below five the rating
is.

Our own
guideline:

A means the movie is so good it
will appeal to you even if you hate the genre.

B means the movie is not
good enough to win you over if you hate the
genre, but is good enough to do so if you have an
open mind about this type of film. Any film rated B- or better
is recommended for just about anyone. In order to rate at
least a B-, a film should be both a critical and commercial
success. Exceptions: (1) We will occasionally rate a film B- with
good popular acceptance and bad reviews, if we believe the
critics have severely underrated a film. (2) We may also
assign a B- or better to a well-reviewed film which did not do well at the
box office if we feel that the fault lay in the marketing of
the film, and that the film might have been a hit if people
had known about it. (Like, for example, The Waterdance.)

C+ means it has no crossover appeal, but
will be considered excellent by people who enjoy this kind of
movie. If this is your kind of movie, a C+ and an A are
indistinguishable to you.

C
means it is competent, but uninspired genre fare. People who
like this kind of movie will think it satisfactory. Others
probably will not.

C- indicates that it we found it to
be a poor movie, but genre addicts find it watchable. Any film
rated C- or better is recommended for fans of that type of
film, but films with this rating should be approached with
caution by mainstream audiences, who may find them incompetent
or repulsive or both. If this is NOT your kind of movie, a C-
and an E are indistinguishable to you.

D means you'll hate it even if you
like the genre. We don't score films below C- that
often, because we like movies and we think that most of them
have at least a solid niche audience. Now that you know that,
you should have serious reservations about any movie below C-.
Films rated below C- generally have both bad reviews and poor
popular acceptance.

E means that you'll hate it even if
you love the genre.

F means that the film is not only unappealing
across-the-board, but technically inept as well.

Based on this description, Tuna
graded the film a C, as a meaningful, powerful
drama. Scoop agrees with the grade, but did not enjoy the film,
finding it repetitious and irritatingly inconsistent.